"The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented — as an author invents characters in a novel — all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires….It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own."
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, “The New Men”
(Source: chelsadactyl)
"If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give [us] free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having."
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, “The Shocking Alternative”
"God has no needs. Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty—of a want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed good in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God’s love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, lovability. God is Goodness. He can give good but cannot need or get it. In that sense all His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive."
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, “Divine Goodness”
(Source: cslewisthoughts)
"God who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing — or should we say ‘seeing’? there are no tenses in God — the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffucation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a ‘host’ who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and ‘take advantage of’ Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves."
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
(Source: shneevon)
"God has reigned from a Tree. How favored the Tree on whose branches hung the Ransom of the world; it was made a balance on which His body was weighed, and bore away the prey that hell had claimed."
— Venantius Fortunatus, Passion Hymn
"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, “Counting the Cost”
(Source: padrepiosson)
"[God] has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense."
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, “Divine Goodness”
(Source: letsjustleap)
"Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head."
— G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered, “Wine When it is Red”
"‘Are the gods not just?’
‘Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?’"
— C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold
"Within this Christian vision for marriage, here’s what it means to fall in love. It is to look at another person and get a glimpse of the person God is creating, and to say, ‘I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that. I want to partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne. And when we get there, I will look at your magnificence and say, ‘I always knew you could be like this. I got glimpses of it on earth, but now look at you!"
— Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage, “The Mission of Marriage”
(Source: plumnellie, via charislogia)
